Guest posts are the latest web marketing technique to put a company’s name in front of an audience.
These are, supposedly, relevant articles written by a writer not affiliated with the website that posts them. They always include links back to a sponsor’s site; hopefully, those links are relevant as well.
I don’t think these guest posts are necessarily bad, provided they provide accurate, relevant information that you might find useful. So far, I’ve posted a few of them.
However, what used to be an infrequent request has now grown to 5-6 proposals a week! While many of these, I suspect, are spam come-ons, a few are legitimate. I just can’t tell, immediately, which those might be. So I put together a set of rules that I send to anyone that asks as a way to winnow the wheat from the chaff.
LARRY’S RULES ON GUEST POSTS
Our audience is professional media creators, with a high-level of sophistication with both technology and software. Consumer-oriented or generic business titles are not of interest to us.
This means we are interested in articles about media technology and post-production.
Based upon past experience, it would save both of us time if you could send me an outline of what you want to write. This helps us make sure you are on-target before you start actually writing the article.
Far too often, guest articles are written for a general business or consumer audience. These tend to be generic and lack substance. These articles are not published.
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It always tickles me how quickly I never hear from almost all of these folks again. However, there are a few who are actually serious about doing a good job They respond and, in a few cases, have created something worth sharing with you.
Since I’m now adding periodic guest posts to my website, I want to share with you the criteria I consider before I post them.